Mines
Coal mining is the economic mainstay of the Hunter Valley in Australia. Thiess is in charge of coal extraction here as a contract miner and extracts six million metric tons a year from the one mine alone. While the diggers carve coal out of the ground on one side of the gigantic hole, trees already grow on the other thanks to a rehabilitation program. By the time extraction ceases in 2017, Mt Owen is planned to have five times as much forest as before mining began. Ample space, in other words, to provide habitats for the native flora and fauna. Thiess is familiar with sustainable site rehabilitation and has many years of experience. The company makes protecting the environment an integral part of its management system and working methods to ensure mining activities have minimum impact on ecosystems.
Airports
Biomonitoring at HOCHTIEF’s Düsseldorf and Hamburg airports makes it possible to trace their effects on the surrounding environment. Between April and August, 350,000 honey bees forage the airport sites for food. The bees, whose hives are located near the airports, take up pollutants from the water, the air, pollen and the nectar of local plants. These substances can then be identified in the honey. Independent labs therefore continually analyze honey from the airport grounds for pollutants such as heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). With encouraging results: To date, the honey complies fully with food safety standards.
Roads and tunnels
In partnership with another company, HOCHTIEF PPP Solutions is undertaking the first expressway contract on a public-private partnership basis in eastern Germany. The A4 upgrade between Gotha and the Hesse state border scores especially well in terms of sustainability. Half the
previous road is being torn up and the land rehabilitated by HOCHTIEF Construction and its consortium partners. The reclaimed material goes into the new roadway. Rerouting the A4 also creates an ecological network restoring an unbroken natural link between Hainich National Park and the Thuringian Forest.
The consortium including HOCHTIEF PPP Solutions carrying out the “Y” project in Austria has devised a special landscape ecology mitigation scheme. The road contract takes in a 51-kilometer section of the Vienna northeastern bypass. A total of 510,000 new plants are to line the finished route. Alongside bushes and shrubs indigenous to the locality, they will include 1,200 trees, 15,000 climbers, 30,000 aquatic perennials and even 250 fruit trees. A class of fourthgraders from Grossebersdorf north of Vienna helped replant a field with 150 new plants in November 2008. All earth excavated in the project—a total of 9.3 million cubic meters—is reused, some of it in noise barriers.
Leighton companies Thiess and John Holland are both in the consortium performing one of Australia’s biggest transportation infrastructure contracts. The major undertaking consists of three individual projects in Brisbane: The Airport Link, the Northern Busway and the Airport Drive Connection. The Airport Link, which the consortium has the contract to design, finance, build and operate, is a fully electronic toll road and includes more than five kilometers of tunnel—making the section concerned the longest road tunnel on the continent and relieving the surface environment. Over 5,000 trees and a million new plants will additionally enrich the Airport Link’s surroundings from mid2012.
In the East Link project in Melbourne, Thiess and John Holland have been part of Australia’s largest ever urban road development scheme. The works include a 45-kilometer